Wednesday, June 13, 2012

I just installed a new Fedora 17 system to get familiar with it. Now I am trying to install the brand new ROS Fuerte on this Fedora system following the instructions here.

Everything went fine until the make & install step

make -j8
sudo make install

First, it is better to be cautious and just type

make

without the

-j8

part. Parallel compilation can get you into trouble some times! Second, with the

sudo make install

step, I got an error complaining about the directory ~/ros-underlay/catkin/bin/em is not found. Seems like this directory have to be present as if in a Debian system. So, mkdir ~/ros-underlay/catkin/bin/em solved this problem (apparently!).

Following the instructions with the Desktop-Full install, I got another error at the step

rosdep install -a

ERROR: Rosdep experienced an internal error.Please go to the rosdep page [1] and file a bug report with the message below.[1] : http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosdep

Bad installer [yum]: global name 'pkgs' is not defined

Actually, it seems like there is a ticket filed already for this bug here. Following the bug assignee instructions, I downloaded the latest rosdep from github, and then extracted the archive ans installed it using

ERROR: the following packages/stacks could not have their rosdep keys resolvedto system dependencies:rxtools: No definition of [swig-wx] for OS [fedora]python_qt_binding: No definition of [python-qt-bindings] for OS [fedora]image_proc: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]image_view: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]cv_bridge: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]image_rotate: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]opencv2: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]image_geometry: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]cv_markers: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]stereo_image_proc: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]opencv_tests: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]depth_image_proc: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]camera_calibration: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]pcl_ros: No definition of [pcl] for OS [fedora]

I tried installing the assimp-devel package. But this did not solve the problem. I also installed the opencv-devel and the pcl-devel packages.

At this point, I decided to abandon it altogether, since I need to make a custom YAML config file! Since Fedora was a fresh install anyway, and since ROS only supported Ubuntu officially, I decided to give it a try on Ubuntu 12.04.

Trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 on Dell Vostro 470 gave me all kinds of trouble! At first, the graphical installer did NOT work, so I had to try the text-based installer (aka alternate installer). It was successful, but then I had to manually install the ubuntu-desktop package since I had no desktop installed! Not to mention that I was only able to log in to the system using the Recovery mode from GRUB menu. The default mode was giving me a garbled screen similar to this one, and I could never log into my system.

To fix the garbled display problem, I did what was advised on this page, by changing the kernel command line from 'quiet splash' to 'nomodeset':

Favorite Quotes

"Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value" - Albert Einstein

- "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving" - Albert Einstein

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education" - Albert Einstein

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" - Edsger Dijkstra

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - Brooks's Law

- "Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get" - Jerry Avins (?)

"Engineering for me is about being inventive, solving problems, being creative, and actually making things" - James Dyson

"For humans, honesty is a matter of degree. Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth" - Scott Adams

"Hate has a reason for everything. Love is unreasonable" - V. Raiuhes Ahaefvthe

"Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn" -Benjamin Franklin